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Just a quick one – happy birthday to me! I got myself a pair of Chuck Taylor Converse All-Star Hi-Tops, which is just killerbee. I’ve been wanting a pair for a couple of years, and I couldn’t find any in my size until now.

I also have a new bike on order, which should be arriving on Friday, and it is possibly one of the coolest bikes in the world. It’s single speed, tough, utilitarian… Oh, yeah, and it’s also bright orange with custom white tyres. It’s made by a company called Old Skool Hooligans, and it rocks so hard that I may have to get a special business card made to express just how awesome it is and give it out to complete strangers.
It’s going to be a good birthday week 🙂

The Sturmey-Archer hub didn’t need to be replaced after all; the bloke managed to get the sprocket replaced without needing to completely replace the hub, which is something of a relief, because they’re complicated buggers. He also fixed up the cotter pins, fiddled the Bowden cables a little and fitted new tyres. All in all, he did a good job, and I would highly recommend Behind Bars for the quality of their customer service.

With my usual obsessiveness, I’ve recently started reading up on Sturmey-Archer and Raleigh, a lot of it coming from the late Sheldon Brown, whom I’ve only just discovered, but who seemed to be a bike nut and general all-round expert.

One of the useful pieces of information I culled from Sheldon is to do with dating Sturmey-Archer hubs. They all used to have a two digit stamp on the hub itself, next to the product code. Most hubs were the AW, which is pictured above. The dates, as I said, were stamped as two digit numbers, from 1940 onwards. The hubs began to be dated, though, in the 1930s, and only had a single digit; so a hub marked with a 6, for example, is from 1936. The digit marked on my bike is 8, meaning that the hub at least is 70 years old.

Having found this out, I looked more closely at the frame, thinking that I might be able to identify the model. But it didn’t match up with the Raleigh frames available at the time, so I thought that it might be a later model. Still no luck there, as it didn’t match up with them. I then asked my grandfather, who told me it was a foreign make.

So, in the end, what I have is an all-steel frame of indeterminate foreign manufacture of indeterminate date, with a 1930s SA gear hub. Mysteriousness abounds! If I can get some pictures taken of it, I’d love to know if anyone can identify it.

In which I try to do bike-related things and fail; also a short piece about being CRB checked.

The bike was to come from Woolworths, and was duly ordered. Due to the ineptitude of the delivery company, they weren’t able to deliver it until Monday, a full week after it was bought and paid for. I took one of my annual leave days, because they couldn’t tell me when it would be delivered. After being told by Woolworths first thing in the morning that it would be arriving between 9:00 and 1:00, I duly waited for it. I then had a call from the driver of the van to say that it would be mid afternoon. Grr etc. I duly made dinosaur noises, and then settled in for the wait.

2:30 rolled around, and I got my bike. W00t! I unpacked it, at which point, I thought that it looked a little on the small side. Hmm. Maybe that was just because it was in pieces. After assembling it, it was definitely too small. Gah! Like by about 4 inches or so. This was after reading on their website that said bike would be a perfect fit. This is obviously too small to be dealt with. A little bit too small is one thing, but this was just not to be borne. So it’s going back.

Luckily, I hadn’t yet done anything with the old bike I’d inherited from my granddad. It’s a fifty(ish) year-old Raleigh utility bike, suitable for a wide range of activities, with a steel frame. It’s like the one in the picture, but in light racing green with a basket on the front.

It’s creaky, the tyres are perished and the chain is all sagged out. This morning, I took it to a bike shop in town which also does repairs; they said it’d be about £60 or so replace the lot, and I could have it back at the end of the day. I did my Monty Burns impression and left my work number, anicipating that I would pick it up at the end of the day, the old sit-up-and-beg rejuvenated and raring to go.

Unfortunately, I got a call later on to say that the rear sprockets are completely knackered, meaning that the beautiful, original Sturmey-Archer gear hub would have to be replaced. Luckily, they had a second hand one, but it meant that the bike would have to be picked up tomorrow morning. Damn and blast and aaargh!

Still, at least I will have a working bike tomorrow morning again. I’d forgotten how slow it feels to walk anywhere.

Well, I think it can be said that the first day at the new office went well.

I found all of the stuff that I had packed sitting on my desk, and I mean all of it. A huge pile of stuff. I got most of it put away, and then we moved onto the filing. There were approximately 35 boxes of it, packed full. Not small ones, either – each of them is about 1 1/2 metres long, half a metre wide and the same deep. That’s a lot of filing, I’ll tell you right there.

I then spent most of the day teaching other people how to use the phone system and new photocopier-printer-fax-scanner thingie. This despite having only this morning been taught how to use them myself by the ICT people. Further real work was prevented by my database playing up. On the plus side, I do have a new computer, factory fresh. On the negative, so does everyone else, so I also spent a long time setting minor problems to rights with them, too… All in all, it’s been a busy day, but satisfying in a way: we’re completely moved into the fancy new building on the business park, and while the office is open plan and shared with other teams, by the time they move in, we’ll have been there months already and will have superiority and they’ll have to adapt to us, rather than the other way around. Office politics.

I’m still working on the bit about I Am Legend, but will have it soon.

In other news – the most popular search term for me right now is Charles Darwin, and untold numbers of people are looking at the birthday post I did way back when. And I have no idea why.

Speaking of searches, one of my most popular terms is dinosaur noises. Whoever is consistently searching for dinosaur noises and finding me, I salute you – your nutty persistence is a testament to human weirdness. As strange as that is, it pales in comparison to the newest persistent search term, which is pirate noises. The third most popular weird search is donkey in a bathtub and variations thereupon.

I think anyone who visits this blog regularly has by now realised that I am not a frequent blogger. It doesn’t come particularly easy for me, most of the time, and I often just don’t feel like I can be bothered to do it, if I’m honest.

And that leads me to feel a little guilty – which is ridiculous! I know that the Odd Blog isn’t XKCD or Feministing or Alas, A Blog. People aren’t waiting with bated breath for my latest pronouncements on whatever happens to interest me lately; I know some of you turn up whenever I post something (mainly because I have secret cameras installed in your houses), but I also know that you probably aren’t going to be riddled with sorrow if I don’t post anything for a week or two.Read the rest of this entry »